Tackling period poverty: the inception

Imagine the usual final year scenario. You’re sitting there, mind blank, with a colossal dissertation to plan, research and write up: and no clue where to begin. I was in that hopeless situation last November, after having tried and ditched four ideas [insert imaginary room full of screwed up paper here]. Running over to my best friend/life advisor’s house for a wail and a cup of tea, they asked me to think. Think about what was going on in the world that struck me, what I wanted to delve into more. The word formed on my lips before I consciously thought about it: periods. Periods!? I can explain. The topic had been at the forefront of the media at the time; with all the anger and activism about the tampon tax, about taboos in the Global South and women’s lack of access to sanitary products, and a smattering of articles about disenfranchised women in the UK and US who couldn’t afford the “luxury” of paying to manage their periods. *PING!* (Not sure what the correct onomatopoeic word is for a lightbulb, but I reckon that’s pretty close).  I began to research further into the topic of managing periods while experiencing homelessness, as many of the articles at the time (apart from The Homeless Period) were solely focused on the US, and, with Bristol’s large homeless population, it could be a real local issue.

Moving away from the public media I began to scour research publications by academics and homeless organisations. I was surprised to find that menstruation was hardly mentioned in reports for service provision or healthcare and wellbeing. The only understanding that I had of their real experiences of menstruating while on the streets was from the four or five interviews that were featured in news articles. Why wasn’t menstruation mentioned in any official reports of homelessness focused on women’s health and services? Pretty weird since it’s estimated that single women make up over a quarter of the clients of homelessness services in the UK[1]. That’s not even counting women with families and partners, or women in irregular housing situations that don’t use homelessness services. That’s a lot of potential menstruators who might be struggling to manage their periods financially or even emotionally.

I had a few theories about this oversight. Firstly, homeless women are more vulnerable to experiencing verbal or physical abuse, drug dependency and mental health problems than the rest of us[2]. These, alongside the issues of not being able to afford housing or food, are grave problems and therefore take priority of organisations’ efforts. Maybe menstruation just wasn’t important enough of an issue to use their resources on, or they possibly hadn’t thought of it as an issue. However, it is an important health issue: not only can periods lower your mood or be quite painful, studies have shown that poor menstrual hygiene management is one of the main causes of reproductive tract infections[3]. Another theory was that homeless women didn’t really want to talk about their intimate bodily processes to organisations and researchers, as menstruation has been stigmatised and cast as disgusting in most cultures[4].

So I set out to investigate more about realities of having a period while being homeless, trying to find concrete, real answers. I spoke to homeless women about their experiences and to service providers about what they were doing to help. My initial report for No More Taboo is here.

The project that we’re setting up now is going to be bigger and better. We’re going to increase the outreach of the research to include more organisations and more participants. Our aim is to set up long-standing relationships with shelters and organisations to ensure that the women who use homeless services feel comfortable talking about their periods and have good access to sanitary products. We also want to ensure that they know they have a safe, warm place to go to rest if they’re feeling a bit off. If you’re an organisation that wants to get involved, get in touch with me here. The project is also going to extend to include women on low incomes who are struggling to get by. We aim to get them involved in considering the economic and environmental sustainability of reusable sanitary products, saving not only their pockets but also helping the Earth.

I’ll be updating the blog on my progress as I go along, so stay tuned!

Shai xx